Phasing out inputs programme will hurt poor - Oxfam

The government of Malawi plans to end its distribution of free seeds and fertiliser to the rural poor, Finance Minister Goodall Gondwe has said. Instead, a facility to provide subsidised fertiliser to poor farmers will be included in the budget, to be presented in July, Gondwe told a meeting at Mzuzu in the north of the country. But Oxfam country programme manager Mary Nyang'wa told IRIN that ending the extended Targeted Inputs Programme (TIP) would have a "very negative impact on the lives of poor people". The TIP was initially run for two consecutive years, during the maize-growing seasons of 2000-01 and 2001-02, with the aim of providing small-scale farmers with an agricultural inputs pack containing fertiliser, maize seed and legume seeds. Although the programme received widespread acclaim, there were problems in implementing it. The TIP followed on from the Malawi government's starter pack campaign, which ran from 1998 to 2000, and at its peak reached 2.8 million households. TIP represented a more focused approach, and in 2002 was scaled back to roughly a million beneficiaries. An emergency winter TIP campaign was conducted for the 2002/03 growing season, and the TIP exercise was extended to 2004 when the government reached agreement with a key donor for the distribution of free farm inputs to two million households. However, the agreement was only reached in October 2004, and by the time the main planting rains arrived in November, "a large, but ultimately unknown, percentage of farmers planted maize and tobacco without initial fertiliser applications," a report by researcher Lawrence Rubey pointed out. [http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=46920] This sparked concern "that Malawi will face a reduced harvest in 2005 ... triggering another hike in maize prices, and a possible food crisis", Rubey said. The University of Reading noted in its report on the TIP campaign that the major food crisis of 2002, with a peak of 3.2 million people in need of food aid, was not a one-off event. The crisis evolved partly as a result of the "smallholder sub-sector's inability to adjust to agricultural liberalisation". The authors underlined the importance of free inputs to smallholder farmers and recommended a "return to a universal free inputs programme, because this is an effective, low-cost way of enhancing food security". Oxfam's Nyang'wa agreed, saying, "there are some people who depended solely on the extended TIP, and there are others who [care for] orphans and cannot afford fertiliser and seeds - these are the people who will be affected". However, she noted that the TIP had experienced management difficulties. "There has been a lot of problems in distributing free fertiliser and seeds to the people - what was needed was a complete restructuring [of the TIP programme]." Apart from free inputs to boost smallholder crop production, a large number of Malawians will need food aid this year, given the impact of another prolonged dry spell. Executive director of the Institute for Policy Interaction (IPI) Rafiq Hajat said scrapping the TIP "will impact negatively on the rural poor, because most of them have not yet learned how to be self-sufficient ... we are looking at a massive disaster in the years to come". Minister Gondwe told the public broadcaster, the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, that the government had decided to axe the TIP because Britain had stopped funding the programme, and about Kwacha 3 billion (US $26.8 million) had been set aside for fertiliser subsidies in the upcoming 2005/06 budget. British High Commission spokesman Lewis Kulisewa confirmed that "DFID [the UK Department for International Development] does not intend to provide funding for TIP". "We have, instead, increased our budgetary support [to Malawi] to £20 million for 2005/06; we understand the government of Malawi has plans for even more effective ways of supporting the agricultural sector than the TIP," he explained. With a food shortage looming in the country this year, Kulisewa added that "DFID is ready to support government plans for food security". For the full University of Reading report: www.rdg.ac.uk